In The Time Traveler’s Wife, water symbolizes how Clare views her relationship with others and with herself. The night before Clare’s and Henry’s wedding, Clare dreams she’s a mermaid living happily underwater on her own. When she surfaces in the dream, Clare’s mother appears and reminds Clare that she needs to get married, causing Clare to doubt whether she’s indeed happy on her own. Clare’s underwater life in the dream symbolizes her contentment with being alone, but she feels doubt once she rises to the surface, where her life revolves around Henry and her loved ones. This symbolism recurs when Clare is in labor with Alba, who she imagines swimming from her womb’s safety to the outside world, where Alba will take her first breath and be exposed to people other than Clare for the first time.
On the other hand, when Clare watches the water from the surface, it symbolizes her separation from Henry during his time travels. Early in the novel, Clare compares herself to a wife watching the horizon for her sailor husband’s return. Henry furthers this comparison in his final letter, describing himself as Homer’s Odysseus lost at sea. He describes Clare as Odysseus’s wife Penelope, at home faithfully waiting for his return. The broad span of the ocean, then, represents the expanse of time that separates the couple during Henry’s episodes. Though Henry’s letter acknowledges that Clare was his guiding light throughout his life, he asserts that he wants her to be free from her agonizing watchfulness after his death. It is significant, then, that when Henry comes to the future to visit Clare as an old woman, he finds her sitting by the window and looking at the shore. Clare’s view of the water in this scene symbolizes her inability to let go of Henry, as she’s unable to return to a time when she was content on her own.
Water Quotes in The Time Traveler’s Wife
It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
[…] Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. […] Why has he gone where I cannot follow?
The dreams merge, now. In one part of this dream I was swimming in the ocean, I was a mermaid. […] Swimming was life flying, all the fish were birds...There was a boat on the surface of the ocean, and we all swan up to see the boat. It was just a little sailboat, and my mother was on it, all by herself. I swam up to her and she was surprised to see me there, she said Why Clare, I thought you were getting married today, and I suddenly realized, the way you do in dreams, that I couldn’t get married to Henry if I was a mermaid, and I started to cry […].
I am living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense. I’m in a diving bell with this baby […].
[…] I kneel beside the bed and pick him up, my tiny boy, jerking like a small freshly caught fish, drowning in air.
I am somehow alone with Alba in the midst of everyone. […] Alba is tunneling headfirst into me, a bone and flesh excavator of my flesh and bone, a deepener of my depths. I imagine her swimming through me, imagine her falling into the stillness of a morning pond, water parting at her velocity.
I know that you have been waiting for me all your life […] Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus along and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a play-thing of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. […] Love the world and yourself in it. Stop waiting and be free.
[…] when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your hair shining in the sun.
This morning everything is clean; the storm has left branches strewn around the yard, which I will presently go out and pick up: all the beach’s sand has been redistributed and laid down fresh in an even blanket pocked with impressions of rain, and the daylilies bend and glisten in the white seven a.m. light. I sit at the dining room table with a cup of tea, looking at the water, listening. Waiting.
Today is not much different from all other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. […] But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.
Water Symbol Timeline in The Time Traveler’s Wife
